About a Girl

  ‘Having fun?’

  And before I knew it, I’d tripped over a man sitting in the middle of the beach. I hit the deck hard, managing to hold my camera aloft but dropping to my knees with a force that would definitely leave a bruise. The camera strap jarred on my neck, and, completely incapable of controlling myself, I started to cry.

  ‘Oh dear, oh. Oh don’t, please.’ The man jumped to his knees, sprightly for an old fella, and placed an awkward hand on my shoulder. ‘There, don’t cry. Really, I can’t bear to see a woman cry. I’m very sorry. Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ I gasped for air. I felt like a five-year-old who had skinned her knees. ‘It, doesn’t, really, hurt.’ I choked. ‘I just, can’t, stop, crying.’

  My human tripwire gave me another pat on the shoulder and waited for me to stop making a complete show of myself before speaking again. Once I had wiped away the last tear and was able to press my hand over my raw kneecap without weeping, I gave him a smile and he sighed with relief.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.’ I held out my non-bloody hand and he shook it heartily. ‘I didn’t kick you or anything, did I?’

  ‘No, no,’ he replied, still shaking my hand. ‘I’m the villain of the piece. I saw you coming along but you seemed so engrossed in your pictures, I didn’t want to interrupt. I just assumed you wouldn’t actually walk into an old man.’

  ‘Never assume,’ I said with a mock serious expression. ‘I am quite stupid.’

  Taking a better look at my beach buddy, I realized he wasn’t joking. He was an old man. Dressed in a washed-out blue Nike T-shirt that had probably seen the tumble dryer a thousand times since 1989 and a pair of granddad-appropriate shorts, he looked like Father Christmas on a senior’s beach getaway. A big and impressively full white beard obscured a lot of his face, but what I could see of it was pleasantly wrinkly and he had white panda eyes from wearing sunglasses in the sun. He had to be in his seventies, but if it weren’t for his white hair and wrinkles, you would never know.

  ‘Oh, I don’t believe that for a second,’ he said, finally letting go of my hand and gesturing for me to give him the camera. Reluctant but too polite to resist, I handed it over. ‘I’m Al ? pleased to meet you. You’re on holiday?’

  ‘Working, actually.’ I watched him flick through my morning’s snapshots quickly. ‘I’m Vanessa.’

  I tried not to be a little bit sick in my mouth as I said it.

  ‘And what are you working on in Hawaii, Vanessa?’ he asked with a mixed-up traveller’s accent, handing back my camera. ‘They’re very good, by the way, your pictures.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, turning my baby off to save the battery life. It hadn’t been great five years ago; it wasn’t going to be any better now. ‘I think it’s probably hard to take a bad picture out here, though, isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Al squinted into the sunshine. ‘Even the most beautiful woman can look ugly if you’ve got the wrong man behind the camera.’ He waved a regal hand towards me. ‘Or woman, of course.’

  ‘Well, I hope you’re right,’ I replied, nursing the camera in my lap as the throbbing in my knee died down. ‘I’m here taking photographs for a magazine.’

  ‘A shutterbug, are you?’ He combed his fingers through his magnificent beard as he stared out at the ocean and I fought the urge to reach out and give it a tug. He made the Santa in Selfridges look like an amateur. And I would know because Amy made me go and sit on his knee every bloody year. ‘Wasn’t sure if you were just at this for fun. And what are you taking pictures of?’

  ‘I’m doing something for this fashion magazine called Gloss? I’m taking pictures of Bertie Bennett?’ Now I was going up at the end of my sentences, just like nobhead Nick. ‘He owns this beach, actually. Do you know him?’

  ‘Know of him,’ Al said. ‘He’s a character.’

  ‘He’s a character that’s cancelled on me twice since I’ve got here. Fingers crossed he’s not avoiding me.’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t know what a pretty young thing you are,’ he said, giving me a twinkly grandpa grin. ‘I’m sure he’d be happy to sit for a snap or two if he did.’

  I wasn’t sure if it was the sea air or the fact that I’d clearly gone completely insane, but I looked away and giggled. Somewhere in the back of my mind, London Tess gave me a disgusted look. But I liked Al. He reminded me of my granddad. He reminded me of everyone’s granddad. And he just seemed so nice.

  ‘Do you live nearby?’ I asked, slipping my feet out of my leather flip-flops and wiggling my toes until they had disappeared into the sand. ‘It’s so gorgeous here.’

  ‘I do,’ he said, pointing over at a little cabin a way down the beach. ‘That’s me. Just in the summer, though. The wife never likes to be away from the city in the winter.’

  The cabin looked too tiny for anyone to live in it, let alone two people. ‘You’re married?’

  ‘Was,’ he clarified. ‘I lost Jane two years ago. Still not very good at remembering she’s not here any more.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ I winced. Hurrah! Another awkward conversation! ‘Were you married for a long time?’

  ‘Thank you. We were married fifty years,’ Al replied, clearly used to fielding condolences. ‘I do miss the old girl, but she’s in a better place now. No one wants to drag these things out, do they?’

  ‘They don’t,’ I agreed readily. Amy and I had a reciprocal pull-the-plug-pact that I secretly worried I would never be able to see through. I was not concerned about her ability to make the same tough decision. ‘So you’re retired now?’

  ‘Semi.’ He shook the misty look out of his eyes and wiggled his bare toes at the sea. ‘I was doing something I loved and then I was asked to stop doing it. Now I’m not sure what to do with myself.’

  ‘I understand completely,’ I nodded, not wanting to ask unwelcome questions and make him feel awkward.

  ‘So is there a Mr Vanessa?’ Al asked in classic elderly-relative style. ‘A paramour back at home?’

  ‘It’s a bit of a long story.’ I heard my voice break ever so slightly and pressed my fingernails into my palm to distract myself. ‘But to make a long story short, no, there is not.’

  Al nodded gravely, his baseball cap bobbing up and down. ‘Ahh, to suffer the slings and arrows of young love again.’

  My spluttering laugh squeezed out a lone tear that I wiped away quickly before Al could see. ‘Quite.’

  ‘These things all work themselves out when you’re young,’ he said, smiling gently. ‘Tell me more about these photos of yours. Have you been doing it long? Must be a bit of a big shot if you’re taking pictures for this fashion magazine.’

  ‘That’s actually an even longer story than the boy nonsense,’ I said, slipping the camera strap back around my neck and hoping that the longer I wore it, the more I would feel like a real photographer. ‘I used to do quite a bit of photography stuff, then I did something else for a while, but I lost my job so now I’m back into it.’

  ‘I’m glad you found your way back,’ he said. ‘You looked so happy when you were taking those pictures, like you were in another place.’

  ‘Just concentrating,’ I laughed, oddly unable to accept the compliment. Usually I rolled around in professional praise like a pig in shit. ‘Just trying to get it right.’

  ‘Trust me –’ Al tapped me on my uninjured knee ? ‘when you get to my age, you can tell these things. I know when someone’s got a passion for something. You were a million miles away.’

  ‘I suppose I was,’ I said, looking down at the camera. She gazed back up at me with love. Maybe this was meant to be. Or maybe Al was a crazy old beach bum who didn’t have a blind clue what he was talking about.

  ‘Don’t waste time worrying about the things you don’t have,’ he went on, imparting his pensioner wisdom. ‘This is what you should be doing.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’ I unconsciously stroked the camera case and looked at Al. He was nodding sagely.

&n
bsp; ‘I always am,’ he said, hopping to his feet far faster and with more grace than I ever could and holding out his hand again. ‘Well, I have places to be, things to do. What a pleasure it was to meet you, Vanessa.’

  ‘And you, Al,’ I said, sad to see him go. ‘Thank you for being so kind about my pictures.’

  ‘Just honest,’ he corrected me as he took off in a jog. An actual jog. ‘Hope to see you again.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll jog back to the cottage,’ I murmured, turning to look at the mile or so I’d wandered in the past couple of hours. Hmm. Maybe I’d just have a lovely walk.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The walk back to the cottage might not have helped me look any better in my bikini, but it did give me time to think and develop a little bit more confidence in my photos. So far I hadn’t quite managed to cock up entirely, but I wasn’t doing terribly well with my double identity. I was still very much Tess, and, as I’d established, Tess was not working for me. I needed to work on Brand Vanessa. Obviously my Vanessa wasn’t going to be quite the same as the original, but there was definitely some room for improvement on my previous personality. Settling down at the desk, I pulled a pad of thick white paper and a couple of coloured markers out of the drawer. Coloured markers made everything better. I drew a thick black line down the middle of the page, and on one side, at the top, I wrote ‘TESS’, and on the other ‘VANESSA’.

  ‘Right ? work mode,’ I whispered, shifting around to edge the last remaining grains of sand out of my bikini bottoms. ‘What is Brand Tess?’

  Taking the cap off my green pen, I started with words I was sure of. Loyal, honest, dedicated, hardworking, a good friend, quite funny, relatively clever. Genuine. I stopped. I had run out of steam worryingly quickly. Looking at the list over and over, I began to wonder, was I a good friend? Amy and I had been besties since before we were born, and, yes, I had plenty of work buddies, but how many other genuine friends did I have other than shithead Charlie? Who was I forgetting? My sisters were hardly beating the door down to hang out with me. With gritted teeth I added some more words to the list that I didn’t like nearly as much. Shy. Walkover. Lazy. Boring.

  I sort of knew I was boring. Amy might not have had a steady job in ten years, but she was always trying something new or going off on an adventure. Before this, the furthest my passport had taken me in the past two years was on a work trip to Brussels, and I’d spent most of the time throwing up after some dodgy moules frites. And I’d only had the moules frites because someone had made me. That was the old Tess Brookes, someone who thought eating shellfish and chips was a wild night out. The girl who had been waiting for her best friend to fall in love with her and kick-start her life. But my life didn’t need kick-starting; it needed a crash cart and a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart à la Mia Wallace. By coming to Hawaii and pretending to be Vanessa, I’d effectively Pulp Fiction-ed my own existence. But what now?

  I had to change. I couldn’t sit through another meal blushing at Nick Miller and start sobbing on the beach every time a complete stranger even hinted towards a romantic interest back at home. If Tess was boring and lazy and cowardly, what was Vanessa? I took the lid off the red pen.

  Bitch. Slut. Selfish. Mean. Gorgeous. Lazy.

  Well, what do you know ? we had something in common: we were both lazy mares.

  ‘Not that I would mind adding slut to my column as well,’ I told the empty room. The empty room was sympathetic.

  Not only had sleeping with Charlie been the worst idea since Amy had tried to make toast at university by ironing a loaf of Kingsmill, but it had also reminded me that my ladyparts didn’t exist exclusively to cause me agony once a month and keep hot-water bottle companies in business. I had the raging horn and there was nothing I could do about it. Well, there was quite literally one thing I could do ? Nick Miller. But I was almost certain that would be the second worst idea since Amy’s amateur Heston Blumenthal moment. However, that was exactly what Vanessa would have done, I thought to myself ? she would have shagged him then and there last night. Over the table. Probably with Kekipi filming the whole thing. I might hate her, but when she wanted something, she took it. I’d spent ten years waiting for Charlie to get drunk and bored enough to put it in me. Presumably Vanessa had put less than ten minutes’ work into getting him to shag her with such enthusiasm ? and then he’d taken her on a mini-break to Wales within a week. Granted, I had very little interest in going on a mini-break to Wales, but I was sure there was a lesson to be learnt somewhere in there.

  Putting pen to paper, I scribbled down some more words. Assertive. Bold. Fickle. Sexy. Carefree. Un-self-conscious. Proud. Adventurous. Exciting. Confident. Basically, Vanessa was all the things I wasn’t. I noticed the Vanessa column was a lot longer than the Tess column. And a lot more interesting.

  With all my keywords written down, I moved on to the next part of my rebrand. My visual message. After several deep breaths, I locked myself in the bathroom and stripped off. OK. It wasn’t so bad. I’d definitely seen worse on Embarrassing Bodies. Clearly I’d spent considerably more hours sitting on my arse than hammering the treadmill, but I was only twenty-eight, I’d mostly stayed off the pies, and gravity hadn’t been too cruel a mistress. My ridiculous boobs balanced out my slightly too big arse, and my middle wasn’t squishy to the point of offence. I could wear a bikini and get away with it if I tried not to slouch and breathed in. All the time. And no one really had arms like Jennifer Aniston, did they? Like most things in life, it was all about finding the right angle.

  I untangled my plait and fingered my hair into loose, frizzy waves. With the right amount of Frizz Ease, this could be managed. Or maybe I could cut it all off and dye it blonde. Or shave my head. It had worked for Miley Cyrus. Not so much Britney. Maybe just a trim. But something was still missing? Vanessa still had something I didn’t, aside from a gap between her thighs. I was missing an attitude, confidence. Vanessa just didn’t give a shit.

  Grabbing either side of the sink, I leaned in towards the mirror and stared myself in the big, brown, bloodshot eye.

  ‘You don’t give a shit,’ I told myself. I didn’t look convinced. I mostly looked a bit cold. The AC was on very, very high. ‘You are brave and bold and you get what you want out of life.’

  I’d always been very, very good at selling my campaigns to clients, even when I thought they were ludicrous. The trick was to find a way to believe it, to find the truth in what you were saying and selling. But where was my truth? Retying my bikini, I dashed back out into the kitchen to look for my phone. I needed to call Amy. Amy would know how to make this make sense. The front door was still wide open and the warm breeze was so much more tempting than the frigid air-con that I padded outside while pulling up her number.

  ‘Working hard?’

  Across the way, Nick was sitting outside his cottage, laptop set up under a huge white cotton parasol on a white wooden table. The upkeep on all this white paint must be insane. I made a mental note to ask Kekipi about it. And then immediately erased that note. That was a Tess note. I was not Tess. I was Vanessa.

  ‘And what would Vanessa do?’ I whispered under my breath.

  Phone in hand, number undialled, I marched over to Nick, barefoot and wearing nothing but my striped bikini. I could not think about what I was about to do or it would never happen. Nick rose as I approached, looking as annoyingly bemused and irritatingly handsome as he had at dinner. Pushing my hair back from my forehead, I stopped dead, right in front of him. At five nine in bare feet, I was almost eye to eye with him. I figured he couldn’t be more than five eleven, maybe even five ten if he wasn’t wearing shoes. But this was not the time to take in his choice of footwear. This was the time to take in his golden skin, his ashy-blond hair and his grey-blue eyes.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

  Without saying anything, I grabbed him by the collar of his pale blue shirt and pulled his face down to meet mine. The kiss was an explosion. As soon as I felt his scratchy stub
ble against my tender, sunburned skin and his full, firm lips pressing against mine, I was lost. I pulled him closer, kissed him harder until I forgot to breathe. Nick recovered from his surprise like a pro, and before I’d even closed my eyes, his hands were sliding around my back, down my spine. His skin was hot on my air-con-cool body and while my bikini might have afforded me ample support in the boob department, according to the warm hands currently cupping my backside, the bottoms were much skimpier than I remembered. Suddenly, the shock of physical contact was too much. Just as Nick’s hands began to move up and around my body, I pushed him away, pressing the back of my hand against my bruised lips.

  Nick stared at me like I’d slapped him round the face. I stared back as though I might.

  ‘So I can help you?’ he asked with a wounded, dark tone.

  ‘No.’ I shook my head and tried to pull my bikini bottoms out of their semi-wedgie as subtly as possible.

  ‘Vanessa.’ Nick coughed and laughed all at once, one hand held out to me, the other rearranging his linen shorts. I tried very hard not to look, but obviously I did. And woah. ‘Come here.’

  ‘I’ll see you later,’ I said, backing away before turning towards my own cottage and sprinting inside. As soon as I stepped through the door, I slammed it shut, my hand still pressed against my lips. So that’s how it felt to be Vanessa. And it was not awful.

  I set my phone carefully down on the worktop and pretended I wasn’t shaking from head to toe. Someone was hammering on the front door, but rather than answer it, I made the perfectly rational decision to run into the bathroom, lock the door and start running a shower to drown out the knocking. It had to be Nick, and if I opened it up, I had no idea what would happen. Either I’d have to shag him on the kitchen counter or he’d slap me round the chops. Neither solution would be productive, even if one would be considerably more fun than the other. Why hadn’t I just called Amy? What on earth had possessed me to do something I had never, ever done in twenty-eight years? I blamed the sun. And sand. It was Hawaii’s fault. It was Vanessa’s fault. Tess didn’t walk up to a man she barely knew and definitely disliked and kiss him as if the world was about to end. Tess sat in her seat and watched her best friend kiss said man and then judged her quietly from behind a bottle of Pinot Noir. I needed to get out of my bikini and into some more sensible clothes. I ripped it off. Who could make good decisions while they were prancing around in tiny triangles of fabric?